And yet you do not like Walt Whitman. I remember quite well my chill ofdisappointment when you told me so. At first, hearing it, I thought Imust be wrong to like him, but thank heaven I soon got my balance again,and presently was solaced by the reflection that it was at least aslikely you were wrong not to. You told me it was not poetry. That upsetme for a few days, and then I found I didn't care. I couldn't argue withyou on the spot and prove anything, because the only _esprit_ I have isthat tiresome _esprit d'escalier_, so brilliant when it is too late, soconstant in its habit of leaving its possessor in the dreadfulcondition--or is it a place?--called the lurch; but, poetry or not, Iknew I must always love him. You, I suppose, have cultivated your tastein regard to things of secondary importance to such a pitch ofsensitiveness that unless the outer shell is flawless you cannot, forsheer intellectual discomfort, look at the wonders that often liewithin. I, who have not been educated, am so filled with elementary joywhen some one shows me the light in this world of many shadows that I donot stop to consider what were the words he used while my eyes followedhis pointing finger. You see, I try to console myself for having anunpruned intelligence. I know I am unpruned, and that at the most youpruned people, all trim and trained from the first, do but bear with meindulgently. But I must think with the apparatus I possess, and I thinkat this moment that perhaps what you really most want is a prolongeddose of Walt Whitman, a close study of him for several hours every day,shut up with no other book, quite alone with him in an empty countryplace. Listen to this--you shall listen:
O we can wait no longer, We too take ship, O soul; Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas, Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail, Amid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul). Carolling free, singing our song of God, Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration, O my brave soul! O farther, farther sail! O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God? O farther, farther sail I
Well, how do you feel now? Can any one, can you, can even you read thatwithout such a tingling in all your limbs, such a fresh rush of life andenergy through your whole body that you simply must jump up and, shakingoff the dreary nonsense that has been fooling you, turn your back ondiseased self-questionings and run straight out to work at yoursalvation in the sun?
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXII
Jena, May 20th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--I am sorry you think me unsympathetic. Hard, Ithink, was the word; but unsympathetic sounds prettier. Is itunsympathetic not to like fruitless, profitless, barren things? Not tolike fogs and blights and other deadening, decaying things? From myheart I pity all the people who are so made that they cannot get on withtheir living for fear of their dying; but I do not admire them. Is thatbeing unsympathetic? Apparently you think so. How odd. There is a littleman here who hardly ever can talk to anybody without beginning about hisdeath. He is perfectly healthy, and I suppose forty or fifty, so thatthere is every reasonable hope of his going on being a little man foryears and years more; but he will have it that as he has never marriedor, as he puts it, done anything else useful, he might just as well bedead, and then at the word Dead his eyes get just the look of absolutescaredness in them that a hare's eyes do when a dog is after it. 'Ifonly one knew what came next,' he said last time he was here, looking atme with those foolish frightened hare's eyes.
'Nice things I should think,' said I, trying to be encouraging.
'But to those who have deserved punishment?'
'If they have deserved it they will probably get it,' said I cheerfully.
He shuddered.
'You don't look very wicked,' I went on amiably. He leads a life ofsheerest bread-and-milk, so simple, so innocent, so full of littlehearth-rug virtues.
'But I am,' he declared angrily.
'I shouldn't think half so bad as a great many people,' said I, bent,being the hostess, on a perfect urbanity.
'Worse,' said he, more angrily.
'Oh, come now,' said I, very politely as I thought.
Then he really got into a rage, and asked me what I could possibly knowabout it, and I said I didn't know anything; and still he stormed andgrew more and more like a terrified hare, frightening himself by his ownwords; and at last, dropping his voice, he confessed that he had oneparticularly deadly fear, a fear that haunted him and gave him no rest,that the wicked would not burn eternally but would freeze.
'Oh,' said I shrinking; for it was a bitter day, and the northeast windwas thundering among the hills.
'Great cold,' he said, fixing me with his hare's eyes, 'seems to meincomparably more terrible than great heat.'
'Oh, incomparably,' I agreed, edging nearer to the stove. 'Only listento that wind.'
'So will it howl about us through eternity,' said he.
'Oh,' I shivered.
'Piercing one's unprotected--everything about us will be unprotectedthen--one's unprotected marrow, and turning it to ice within us.'
'But we won't have any marrows,' said I.
'No marrows? Fraeulein Rose-Marie, we shall have everything that willhurt.'
'_Oh weh_' cried I, stopping up my ears.
'The thought frightens you?' said he.
'Terrifies me,' said I.
'How much more fearful, then, will be the reality.'
'Well, I'd like to--I'd like to give you some good advice,' said I,hesitating.
'Certainly; if one of your sex may with any efficacy advise one ofours.'
'Oh--efficacy,' murmured I with proper deprecation. 'But I'd like tosuggest--I daren't advise, I'll just suggest--'
'Fear nothing. I am all ears and willingness to be guided,' said he,smiling with an indescribable graciousness.
'Well--don't go there.'
'Not go there?'
'And while you are here--still here, and alive, and in nice warm woollyclothes, do you know what you want?'
'What I want?'
'Very badly do you want a wife. Why not go and get one?'
His eyes at that grew more hare-like than at the thought of eternal ice.He seized his hat and scrambled to the door. He went through it hissingscorching things about _moderne Maedchen_, and from the safety of thepassage I heard him call me _unverschaemt_.
He hasn't been here since. I would like to go and shake him; shake himtill his brains settle into their proper place, and say while I shake,'Oh, little man, little man, come out of the fog! Why do you choose todie a thousand deaths rather than only one?'
Is that being unsympathetic? I think it is being quite kind.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
What I really meant to write to you about today was to tell you that Iread your learned and technical and I am sure admirable denouncements ofWalt Whitman with a respectful attention due to so much earnestness; andwhen I had done, and wondered awhile pleasantly at the amount of timefor letter-writing the Foreign Office allows its young men, I stretchedmyself, and got my hat, and went down to the river; and I sat at thewater's edge in the middle of a great many buttercups; and there was alittle wind; and the little wind knocked the heads of the buttercupstogether; and it seemed to amuse them, or else something else did, for Ido assure you I thought I heard them laugh.
XXXIII
Jena, May 27th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--You asked me about your successor in our house,and inquire why I have never mentioned him. Why should I mention him?Must I mention everything? I suppose I forgot him. His name is Collins,and some days he wears a pink shirt, and other days a blue shirt, and inhis right cuff there is a pink silk handkerchief on the pink days, and ablue silk handkerchief on the blue days; and he has stuck up thepictures he likes to have about him on the walls of his room, and whereyour Luini used to be there is a young lady in a voluminous hat andshort skirts, and where your Bellini Madonna sat and looked at you withaustere, beautiful eyes
there is the winner, complete with jockey, oflast year's Derby.
'I made a pot of money over that,' said Mr. Collins to me the day hepinned it up and came to ask me for the pin.
'Did you?' said I.
But I think I am tired just now of Luinis and Bellinis and of the sortof spirit in a young man that clothes the walls of his room with them,each in some elaborately simple frame, and am not at all sure that thefrank fleshliness of a Collins does not please me best. You see, onelongs so much sometimes to get down to the soil, down to plaininstincts, to rude nature, to, if you like, elemental savagery.
But I'll go on with Mr. Collins; you shall have a dose of him while I amabout it. He has bought a canoe, and has won the cup for swimming,wresting it from the reluctant hands of the discomfited Jena young men.He paddles up to the weir, gets out, picks up his canoe, carries itround to the other side, gets in, and vanishes in the windings of thewater and the folds of the hills, leaving the girls in thetennis-courts--you remember the courts are opposite the weir--uncertainwhether to titter or to blush, for he wears I suppose the fewest clothesthat it is possible to wear and still be called dressed, and nostockings at all.
'_Nein, dieser Englaender_!' gasp the girls, turning down decent eyes.
'_Hoellish practisch_,' declare the young men, got up in as near animitation of the flannels you used to wear that they can reach, eventheir hats bound about with a ribbon startlingly like your Oxford halfblue; and before the summer is over I dare say they will all be playingtennis in the Collins canoe costume, stockingless, sleeveless, supposingit to be the latest _cri_ in get-ups for each and every form of sport.
Professor Martens didn't care about teaching Mr. Collins, and insistedon handing him over to Papa. Papa doesn't care about teaching him,either, and says he is a _dummer Bengel_ who pronounces Goethe as thoughit rhymed with dirty, and who the first time our great poet wasmentioned vacantly asked, with every indication of a wandering mind, ifhe wasn't the joker who wrote the play for Irving with all the devils init. Papa was so angry that he began a letter to Collins _pere_ tellinghim to remove his son to a city where there are fewer muses; but Collins_pere_ is a person who makes nails in Manchester with immense skill andapplication and is terrifyingly rich, and my step-mother's attitudetoward the terrifyingly rich is one of large forgiveness; so she tore upPapa's letter just where it had got to the words _erbaermlicher Esel_,said he was a very decent boy, that he should stay as long as he wantedto, but that, since he seemed to be troublesome about learning, Papamust write and demand a higher scale of payment. Papa wouldn't; mystep-mother did; and behold Joey--his Christian name is Joey--morelucrative to us by, I believe, just double than any one we have had yet.
'I say,' said Joey to me this morning, 'come over to England some day,and I'll romp you down to Epsom.'
'Divine,' said I, turning up my eyes.
'We'd have a rippin' time.'
'Rather.'
'I'd romp you down in the old man's motor.'
'Not really?'
'We'd be there before you could flutter an eyelash.'
'Are you serious?'
'Ain't I, though. It's a thirty-horse--'
'Can't you get them in London?'
'Get 'em in London? Get what in London?'
'Must one go every time all the way to Epsom?'
Joey ceased from speech and began to stare.
'Are we not talking about salts?' I inquired hastily, feeling that oneof us was off the track.
'Salts?' echoed Joey, his mouth hanging open.
'You mentioned Epsom, surely?'
'Salts?'
'You did say Epsom, didn't you?'
'Salts?'
'Salts,' said I, becoming very distinct in the presence of what lookedlike deliberate wilfulness.
'What's it got to do with salts?' asked Joey, his underlip of ameasureless vacancy.
'Hasn't it got everything?'
'Look here, what are you drivin' at? Is it goin' to be a game?'
'Certainly not. It's Sunday. Did you ever hear of Epsom salts?'
'Oh--ah--I see--Eno, and all that. Castor oil. Rhubarb and magnesia.Well, I'll forgive you as you're only German. Pretty weird, what bits ofinformation you get hold of. Never the right bits, somehow. I'll tellyou what, Miss Schmidt--'
'Oh, do.'
'Do what?'
'Tell me what.'
'Well, ain't I goin' to? You all seem to know everything in this housethat's not worth knowin', and not a blessed thing that is.'
'Do you include Goethe?'
'Confound Gerty,' said Joey.
Such are my conversations with Joey. Is there anything more you want toknow?
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXIV
Jena, July 3d.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--I am sorry not to have been able to answer yourletters for so many weeks, and sorry that you should have been, as yousay, uneasy, but my telegram in reply to yours will have explained whathas been happening to us. My step-mother died a fortnight ago. Almostimmediately after I wrote last to you she began to be very ill. Myfeelings toward her have undergone a complete upheaval. I cannot speakof her. She is revenging herself, as only the dead in their utterunresentfulness can revenge themselves, for every hard and scoffingthought I had of her in life. I think I told you once about her annuity.Now it is gone Papa and I must see to it that we live on my mother'smoney alone. It is a hundred pounds a year, so the living will have tobe prudent; not so prudent, I hope, but that we shall have everything toenjoy that is worth enjoying, but quite prudent enough to force us totake thought. So we are leaving the flat, grown far too expensive forus, as soon as we can find some other home. We have almost decided onone already. Mr. Collins went to England when the illness grew evidentlyhopeless, and we shall not take him back again, for my father does notcare, at least at present, to have strangers with us, and I myself donot feel as though I could cook for and look after a young man in theway my step-mother did. Not having one will make us poor, but I think weshall be able to manage quite well, for we do not want much.
Thank you for your kind letters since the telegram. The ones beforethat, coming into this serious house filled with the nearness of Death,and of Death in his sternest mood, his hands cruel with scourges, seemedto me so inexpressibly--well, I will not say it; it is not fair to blameyou, who could not know in whose shadow we were sitting, for beingpreoccupied with the trivialities of living. But letters sent to friendsa long way off do sometimes fall into their midst with a rather ghastlyclang of discord. It is what yours did. I read them sometimes in thenight, watching by my step-mother in the half-dark room during themoments when she had a little peace and was allowed to slip away fromtorture into sleep. By the side of that racked figure and all it meantand the tremendous sermons it was preaching me, wordless, voicelesssermons, more eloquent than any I shall hear again, how strange, howfar-away your echoes from life and the world seemed! Distant tinklingsof artificialness; not quite genuine writhings beneath not quite genuineburdens; idle questionings and self-criticisms; plaints, doubts, andcomplicated half-veiled reproaches of myself that I should be able to bepleased with a world so worm-eaten that I should still be able to chantmy song of life in a major key in a world so manifestly minor andchromatic. These things fell oddly across the gravity of that room.Shadows in a place where everything was clear, cobwebs of unrealitywhere everything was real. They made me sigh, and they made me smile,they were so very black and yet so very little. I used to wonder whatthat usually excellent housemaid Experience is about, that she has notyet been after you with her broom. You know her specialty is the pullingup of blinds and the letting in of the morning sun. But it is unfair tojudge you. Your letters since you knew have been kindness itself. Thankyou for them.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
It seemed so strange for any one to die in June; so strange to belifeless in the midst of the wanton profusion of life, to grow cold inthat quivering
radiance of heat. The people below us have got boxes ofcalla-lilies on their balcony this year. Their hot, heavy scent used tocome in at the open window in the afternoons when the sun was on them,the honey-sweet smell of life, intense, penetrating, filling everycorner of the room with splendid, pagan summer. And on the bed tossed mystep-mother, muttering ceaselessly to herself of Christ.
XXXV
Jena, July 15th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Our new address is Galgenberg, Jena,--rather grim,but what's in a name? The thing itself is perfect. It is a tiny house,white, with green shutters, on the south slope of the hill amongapple-trees. The garden is so steep that you can't sit down in it excepton the north side of the house, where you can because the house is thereto stop you from sliding farther. It is a strip of rough grass out ofwhich I shall make haycocks, with three apple-trees in it. There is alsoa red currant bush, out of which I shall make jelly. At the bottom,below the fence--rotten in places, but I'm going to mend that--begins areal apple orchard, and through its leaves we can look down on the roofof another house, white like ours, but a little bigger, and with blueshutters instead of green. People take it for the summer, and once anEnglishman came and made a beanfield there--but I think I told you aboutthe beanfield. Behind us, right away up the slope, are pine trees thatbrush restlessly backward and forward all day long across the clouds,trying to sweep bits of clear blue in the sky, and at night spreadthemselves out stiff and motionless against the stars. I saw them lastnight from my window. We moved in yesterday. The moving in was not veryeasy, because of what Papa calls the precipitous nature of the district.He sat with his back propped against the wall of the house on the onlyside on which, as I have explained, you can sit, and worked with apencil at his book about Goethe in Jena with perfect placidity whileJohanna and I and the man who urged the furniture cart up the hill kepton stepping over his legs as we went in and out furnishing the house.There was not much to furnish, which was lucky, there not being much tofurnish with. We have got rid of all superfluities, including thecanary, which I presented, its cage beautifully tied up with the blueribbons I wore at my first party, to the little girl with theflame-colored hair on the second floor. As much of the other things asany one could be induced to buy we sold, and we burnt what nobody wouldbuy or endure having given them. And so, pared down, we fit in herequite nicely, and after a day or two conceded to the suavities of life,such as the tacking up in appropriate places of muslin curtains and thetying of them with bows, I intend to buy a spade and a watering-pot andsee what I can do with the garden.
Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther Page 8